


Doctor Who?

by asarahworld



Series: The Doctor and Rose Tyler [10]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Implied Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler - Freeform, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-19 02:45:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7341472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asarahworld/pseuds/asarahworld





	Doctor Who?

The same man. I'm still him. Variations on a theme of what he had told Rose only hours before. And yet, hadn't he also said that he was an entirely new man? He'd known that something had gone wrong during his regeneration. It had been so much more violent than previous changes - regeneration energy had literally burst from within his body. He supposed that that had come from holding off the change. Holding off regenerating, all the while growing closer to dying permanently, to save one pink and yellow twenty-first century human. He felt responsible for her, yes, but he'd grown to feel responsible for all the companions he'd had over the years. He felt affectionate towards her, but was there a companion who had travelled with him whom he had not liked? He mentally reviewed his companions, the TARDIS bringing up their holograms. To his dismay, the Doctor realized that not only could he not remember some of the former TARDIS occupants' names, but he utterly failed to recognize their face. He supposed that with roughly nine hundred Earth years of time and space travel, he would forget some of the people he had known. But he hadn't realized that that would include his companions. His best friends, his only friends.

Was he still the same doctor who had stolen a TARDIS and run away with Susan? The answer, of course, was no, how could he be the same, how could he be unaffected, unchanged by all he had seen. But, on the other side of the coin, how could could he not be the same adventurous renegade Time Lord? The same wanderlust still ran through his veins, wanderlust that hadn't been tempered over time, wanderlust that led him through the universe. There were very few certainties that the Doctor believed in. The first was that no matter what happened, his trusty time-and-space-ship would be there at the end to take him back into the vortex. The second was... his thoughts meandered astray.

Rose Tyler. His companion. Wherever they went, people assumed that they were a couple. He'd been older looking, gruff and tough in a worn leather jacket. A leather jacket that now lay abandoned in the depths of the TARDIS. Abandoned in the depths of the TARDIS. Rose must be somewhere within the ship, though he hadn't seen her since taking off from the Powell Estate. The Doctor realized that he was quite introspective and remembered the gob he'd proclaimed himself to have earlier. If only Rose... but that thought halted abruptly as the Doctor began to ponder his companion. Regardless of whom he was, he was still the Doctor, and the Doctor needed to look out for his companion.


End file.
